22 January, 2010

Translation Project complete

I have finished the translation project I was working on this past week. When I first began this project, I intended to select some poems and translate into Arabic. I found the Arabic to be a bit daunting (I have only taken 1 year of the language and that was 2005-6), so I switched to a language that I am more familiar with: français! So, I chose the poems - 9 to be exact - and spent most of last weekend translating them from English into French. I asked my best friend, and native of France, to edit my translations, which she happily did. I received her edit back on Wednesday evening and was a bit surprised at how many mistakes I made. After careful review of my errors, some of which were just plain stupid mistakes, I set about to try my hand at calligraphy. I have a little practice in this writing craft, but decided for the sake of time and continuity that I would print (I know, I know, a bit too modern, but it works) the poems out onto the card stock I planned to use for the inside of the book. Here is a picture of the pages:

The font is Old English Text MT. The poem in the picture above has been published by the International Library of Poetry in the anthology "Clouds Across the Stars".


I prepared the covers using a faux leather material, the same card stock, and some spray-on adhesive. This adhesive worked out really well all the way around, although it was a bit sticky! Here is a picture of the covers before the design element was applied:


And here is the cover after the design:

I chose a traditional, simple Islamic design for the cover. I used a blue cotton fabric and overlayed that with green (almost an olive green) faux suede-like fabric.


The binding itself is a “shoelace” style binding using the faux leather material to tie the pieces together.


This was a fun project and quite simple to put together once all of the pieces were collected. I really have to thank my best friend, Christine, for her editing and my father for punching the holes into the covers for me.

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